Parent-of-origin effect and risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: balancing the evidence against bias and chance findings.

摘要

In the December 2005 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Hawi et al. made the intriguing observation that a group of catecholamine-related genes, shown elsewhere1 to be associated with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD [MIM 143465]), further demonstrate a "consistent pattern of preferential paternal transmission of risk alleles to affected children with ADHD." The hallmark of this article is that it collated transmission/disequilibrium information from several genes and tested a combined genetic hypothesis, which led to the identification of remarkably significant statistical effects. We believe that the conclusions of this article are flawed, for the following reasons.